Dear Charlie, we're sorry

He thought it might have been Caroline. But at age 67, Charlie Tyler wasn't sure, so he wrote to his nephew to ask. "Say, Ted," he wondered, "did you or your father ever say what our mother's name was?" That sad and simple question, from a man searching for details of his lost childhood, was part of a letter written to my grandfather in 1961, more than a half-century after Charlie, then 11, and his siblings, arrived in a strange and faraway land known as Canada.

They were among as many as 100,000 British children uprooted and sent here to work as domestic servants or indentured labourers, often on farms, where many were abused.

While these "home children" were typically described as orphans, many, like Charlie, left behind parents they would never see again.

In some cases, parental consent wasn't obtained before they were placed on ships and immigration records wrongly claimed they had no families.

While the majority of home children were sent to Canada, some 10,000 arrived in Australia, where, last month, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized for the "emotional starvation" and physical suffering these "lost innocents" endured. In England, Prime Minister Gordon Brown plans to apologize next year.

Closer to home, federal immigration minister Jason Kenney has said an apology from the Canadian government isn't warranted. The children arrived here through what was essentially a British program, said Kenney, and the public has limited interest in official apologies for every "tragic" event in the country's past.

But Kenneth Bagnall, who wrote a book about the child migration phenomenon, disagrees. "Morally speaking, they (the children) deserve the apology, for history's sake and for ethics' sake," said Bagnall, author of The Little Immigrants: The Orphans Who Came to Canada. "We were participants in a program which I believe to be, on the whole, well-intentioned but misguided. The major defect was the emotional deprivation, the psychological trauma."

While it was aimed in part at giving the children better lives, the Canadian and British governments benefitted, Bagnall noted. England saved the cost of institutionalizing and caring for its poor, while Canada, with its largely agrarian economy, gained a cheap labour force, which helped build the country.

The lengthy episode has also quietly woven its way into our cultural history. It's more than likely the "home child" was also an inspiration for Anne Shirley, the central character in Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, said University of Guelph professor Mary Rubio, a leading authority on Montgomery and literary advisor to her estate.

Up to 4 million Canadians are believed to be descended from children who came here under the program, which ran from 1869 to the 1940s, according to Home Children Canada, an organization that has chronicled the movement.

Kenney acknowledges their contributions and supports a private member's bill from Conservative MP Phil McColeman (Brant) to declare 2010 the year of the British home child, said Kelli Fraser, a spokesperson for the citizenship and immigration department. Canada Post also plans to issue a stamp next year, honoring those at the centre of what Kenney calls this "sad" and "unfortunate" chapter.

But beyond those labels, the circumstances that brought the children to Canada and what became of them after they arrived still isn't widely known. My family's story is one example.

IT'S FASHIONABLE today, but in the 19th century, Shoreditch, in the East End of London, England, was one of the poorest and most diverse areas of the city, where artists and actors mixed with street sellers, dock workers and tradesman. It was also rich territory for early social workers, foremost among them Thomas Barnardo, an Irish philanthopist and one-time medical student who set up a series of homes for vulnerable children and approached his work with an almost missionary zeal, scooping waifs and strays off the streets.

The three youngest sons of Thomas and Caroline Tyler arrived at a "Dr. Barnardo" home through a different route. Neither homeless nor the poorest of the poor, they were descended from a long line of cabinet makers, their father a crafter of "tea tables." Thomas's older sons, including my great-grandfather, worked in the family business as polishers and joiners and their cottage industry generated enough income to pay an apprentice 18 shillings a week, as much as many working class families in the area were earning.

While they managed to eke out a living, the family also experienced great tragedies, including the loss of three children – one to meningitis at five, another who died as a baby and a third who was trammelled by a horse in the street. Two days after Christmas, in 1897, Caroline died at age 38, leaving her husband with seven children to look after, including Charlie, just three. Within four months, Thomas had found himself a second wife, a widow named Mary Ann Hughes, who brought three children of her own into the marriage.

It was not an easy transition and there was more turmoil to come. According to family history, the stage was set for a long-standing feud between the Tyler children and their new stepmother when Mary Ann made the decision to place three of them in a Barnardo residence, keeping her own three children in the family home. In retrospect, it may have been less a case of "evil stepmother" than economic necessity. The family was expanding. Thomas and Mary Ann went on to have five more children of their own and with each passing year there were more mouths to feed.

In some instances, parents had no say over whether their children were sent away. Some mothers who turned to their local council for relief under the existing "poor laws" were told that in exchange for obtaining food vouchers, they would have to place some of their children in home.

Whatever the reason, young Matthew, 12, Charles, 10, and their younger brother, George, 8, entered the Barnardo home on Sept. 15, 1904.

Sometime in the ensuing months, their elder brother, Ted, my great-grandfather, made a failed attempt to "rescue" Charlie, taking him from the home with plans to care for him, even though he was only in his late teens himself. It was a short-lived venture. We are told he was apprehended and threatened with child abduction charges.

Charlie returned to Barnardo's.

That was typical of the paternalistic attitude that prevailed in Victorian England, where well-intentioned members of the upper classes often believed the poor didn't know how to look after their children, said Bagnall.

Young George was the only one of the three brothers who didn't come to Canada. After eight years in the home, he enlisted in the Royal Navy and was killed on New Year's Day 1915 when his ship, the Formidable, was sunk by a German U-boat in the English Channel.

On March 30, 1905, Charlie and Matt boarded the S.S. Kensington, along with more than 200 other boys ranging in age from 6 to 20, and set sail for Canada via Portland, Maine. They were probably one of the last boatloads of youngsters personally seen off from the Liverpool docks by Barnardo himself, who died the following September. Twelve days later, they arrived in Halifax, each child accompanied by a trunk stamped with his or her initials. Inside was a Bible, hymn book and clothing, which for boys included trousers, boots and socks.

They travelled by train to Toronto, where a Barnardo agent arranged for placements with Ontario families. "Put yourself in the shoes of an 8-year-old, from an industrial city in England, being put on a farm that was a mile from the nearest neighbour," Bagnall said. "Even if you weren't mistreated, think of the loneliness."

Martine King, archives and administration manager for Barnardo's, today a highly regarded child welfare agency based in Essex England, said the children were in high demand. For every child who arrived in Canada, there were as many as 20 families who had applied to take them in.

In the "vast majority" of cases, the children fared well, King said. They were given postcards, which they could mail to notify Barnardo's if they ran into any problems and inspectors dropped by the farms about twice a year.

Once they turned 14, they were paid for the work they performed as farmhands and a portion of their earnings was placed in a trust account they could access after turning 21, said King.

However, in many cases, said Bagnall, the farmers who took them in were not prosperous themselves and the children often didn't get paid. "If they were very fortunate, they shared in the inheritance of the farmer and might have gotten a portion of the land."

While some children were treated as members of the family, others were kept at a distance. Some boys were required to sleep in the barn.

"I always remember one woman telling me that, after being placed somewhere in southern Ontario, she was enthralled by the fact that one of the daughters of the farm couple was going to be married, and she so looked forward to that day, to be part of the joy of a wedding," Bagnall recalls. "But the day before (the ceremony) she was told not to show her face. She belonged in the kitchen."

Others felt like outsiders because of their accents. "When I came here," Charlie once recalled, "my accent was so strange and funny to the Canadian ear that people used to offer little Charlie money to hear me give out with some Cockney expressions."

Deeply embarrassed, he practised the "tones" of the Canadian language to erase all trace of his native tongue. Not much is known about what happened to his brother Matthew, who went on to serve on the battlefields during World War I and died of wounds in France in October 1917. Many home children enlisted in the army as a way of getting back to England and finding relatives.

Charlie worked on at least one farm. While never really discussing it in detail, he alluded to being mistreated, an experience confirmed by a neighbour years later. The 1911 census lists a Charles A. Tyler as a "servant" on a farm near Flamborough, working 70 hours a week for about 6 cents an hour.

BY 1910, my great-grandfather, Charlie's would-be "rescuer," decided to get out of England and make a fresh start abroad with his wife and two sons. Inspired by billboards in London encouraging immigration to Canada and Australia, they flipped a coin. Real gamblers, as one of my uncles later said.

They settled in "Acton West," as it was then known, a town about 40 miles west of Toronto, where Charlie eventually caught up with them. He ran a country store on Highway 7, just outside town, for about six years. He was always very big on improving himself and his station in life but, perhaps understandably, a bit unsettled.

Over the years, he worked as a salesman at Eaton's in the Annex, a real estate agent and later he bought an Agincourt hotel, where The Happy Gang, a popular troupe of CBC radio entertainers, came to one of his parties. Eventually, Charlie had a family of his own after marrying May Dean, a widow with children and grandchildren. They settled in Oshawa and took their big Buick Roadmaster on outings, May at the wheel. Despite having only a Grade 2 education, he was articulate, with beautiful penmanship and details of his life spilled out in letters. There wasn't much money. One Christmas he and May had roast beef, he mentioned, but New Year's dinner was "macaroni."

When he wrote to my grandfather in 1961, Charlie was hoping to apply for an old age pension from the federal government. But he couldn't qualify without obtaining a birth certificate. And for that he needed the name of his mother.

He never returned to England and never again saw his father, who died in 1909, five years after Charlie left. Within months of her husband's death, Mary Ann Tyler found herself in the unhappy position of placing two of their daughters, Mary, 10, and Lilian, 6, in another home for poor children. Mary briefly absconded. Lilian ended up in a workhouse.

IN A HAPPY twist, after more than 100 years, the emotional glacier that developed with Mary Ann's entry into the family has melted. Last spring, I was contacted out of the blue by Carol Stocker and her cousin, Pat Fenner, the great-granddaughter of Thomas and Mary Ann Tyler.

These English "grannies," supersleuths with detective skills that would outstrip many reporters, uncovered many details in this story. I hope to meet them in person next summer – Charlie's year.

While he might have been tickled by the newfound interest in the lives of "home children," Charlie would probably be the last person looking for an apology.

In 1955, he told an Oshawa newspaper he considered himself one of the luckiest men alive, having enjoyed every day of his nearly 50 years in his adopted country.

"Canada has been good to me," he said. "I have much to be thankful for.